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My time over the last few weeks has been taken up by Zelda and a few other relatively big things going on in my life. I guess I can take a moment though to at least say something about my time with Zelda and look back at what has been an uncommonly good first quarter of the year in video games.

It almost feels like a fall release schedule in that there has simply been too much new stuff for any one person to play thoroughly, between Gravity Rush 2, Yakuza 0, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Nier: Automata, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. What’s interesting to look at though is that it has been an uncommonly good quarter for console games. Of what I mentioned, only RE7, Nier, and Andromeda have PC versions. If I’d been able to play these games I would have actually gotten some use out of my consoles. Possibly more important though is that this quarter likely signifies 2017 as sort of the year Japanese console games came back. Continue reading →

I finally managed to finish S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat over the weekend (completely vanilla save for a vegetation mod). As fans of the series told me, it improves upon its predecessors (I decided I didn’t have time for Clear Sky) the way a sequel should. It takes a few steps in the direction I wanted to see S.T.A.L.K.E.R. go but didn’t get all the way there, which only increases my disappointment about what happened to its developer. Continue reading →

Note: I played this game completely vanilla save for the Zone Reclamation Project fan-patch.

In a lot of ways, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is the tactical first person shooter I’ve wanted for a while. It has almost the exact mix of mechanics from different kinds of games I’ve wanted to see thrown together. I’d heard of how sad fans were to see developer GSC GameWorld close its doors, see no shooters follow in this game’s footsteps, and see various attempts at a sequel end in cancellation. Now I know why.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a tough game to describe succinctly. People have failed to explain it to me in the past. That odd concoction of FPS elements I’ve wanted to see is similarly hard to describe. Now that I’ve played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I can pretty much just say “like that game.” Continue reading →